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Member Spotlight: Associate Professor Muireann Irish, Memory Program

The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia's Paul Bourke lecture is presented each year by the recipient of the previous year's Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research. This award honours Australians in the early parts of their careers who have achieved excellence in scholarship in one or more fields of the social sciences.

Associate Professor Muireann Irish, an Associate Investigator of the Memory Program based at the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney, has a longstanding interest in the brain networks that support uniquely human functions such as remembering the past and imagining the future.

Her research program aims to delineate how these processes break down in dementia to inform our understanding of the cognitive architecture of memory.

Muireann has also been recognised for her work in diagnosing Alzheimer's disease before symptoms emerge. She is currently looking at individuals who have a genetic predisposition for dementia but who show no outward symptoms in hopes of developing a new generation of clinical tests sensitive to the earliest pathological changes in preclinical dementia.

The quality of Muireann's research has been recognised in a series of awards including a NSW Young Tall Poppy Science Award (2014), the Laird Cermak Award for Outstanding Research in Memory from the International Neuropsychological Society (2013), and a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship (2015). Most recently, she was awarded the 2016 NSW Premier's Prize for Science and Engineering Early Career Researcher of the Year, and was one of 15 women worldwide to be awarded the 2017 L'Oreal-UNESCO International Rising Talent award. She also leads the way in presenting herself proactively as a role model for promoting science to young women.